|
Whether every human being is immortal or we are wholly
destroyed, or whether something of us passes over to dissolution
and destruction, while something else, that which is the true
man, endures for ever- this question will be answered here for
those willing to investigate our nature.
We know that man is not a thing of one only element; he has a
soul and he has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other
mode, a body: this is the first distinction; it remains to
investigate the nature and essential being of these two
constituents.
Reason tells us that the body as, itself too, a composite, cannot
for ever hold together; and our senses show us it breaking up,
wearing out, the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each
of its constituents going its own way, one part working against
another, perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the
material masses are no longer presided over by the reconciling
soul.
And when each single constituent is taken as a thing apart, it is
still not a unity; for it is divisible into shape and matter, the
duality without which bodies at their very simplest cannot
cohere.
The mere fact that, as material forms, they have bulk means that
they can be lopped and crushed and so come to destruction.
If this body, then, is really a part of us, we are not wholly
immortal; if it is an instrument of ours, then, as a thing put at
our service for a certain time, it must be in its nature passing.
The sovereign principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to
this Matter or as agent to this instrument, and thus, whatever
that relation be, the soul is the man.
|
|